Gibson and Sch€ utze (1999) showed that on-line disambiguation preferences do not always mirror corpus frequencies. When presented with a syntactic ambiguity involving the conjunction of a noun phrase to three possible attachment sites, participants were faster to read attachments to the first site than attachments to the second one, although the latter were shown to be more frequent in text co...

This paper summaries our recent work on the application of the concepts of capacity per unit cost and reliability function per unit cost to models of fading channels. The cost is taken to be the energy, or a certain fourth moment functional that is sensitive to the bursti-ness of the signals, and is related to the ambiguity function of the input signal. The channel is assumed to be a Wide-Sense...

We will present two self-paced reading studies that provide new evidence on the incrementality of semantic interpretation, in particular with regard to the notion of discourse complexity as introduced by Gibson's distance-based dependency locality theory (DLT; cf. Gibson, 1998, 2000). More specifically, we will focus on the contribution of referential processing on sentence complexity. The expe...

Languages such as English contain a large number of words with multiple meanings. These words are commonly termed "lexlcal ambiguities", although it is probably more accurate to speak of them as potentially ambiguous. Determining how the contextually appropriate reading of a word is identified presents an important and unavoidable problem for persons developing theories of natural language proc...

In today dynamic information technology era, technical documents are becoming bigger and are updated frequently more than ever. As a result, people have to spend a huge mount of time and efforts to digest these technical documents. Although the traditional technical writing technique helps to produce cohesive and easy-tobe-understood technical documents, it does still suffer the essence problem...

This article examines how certain types of semantic and discourse context affect the processing of relative clauses which are temporarily ambiguous between a relative clause and a main clause (e.g., "The actress selected by the director ..."). We review recent results investigating local semantic context and temporal context, and we present some new data investigating referential contexts. The ...

Spurious ambiguity is the phenomenon whereby distinct derivations in grammar may assign the same structural reading, resulting in redundancy in the parse search space and inefficiency in parsing. Understanding the problem depends on identifying the essential mathematical structure of derivations. This is trivial in the case of context free grammar, where the parse structures are ordered trees; ...

This paper discusses the re-introduction of the concept of functional literacy into policy in England, using Levine’s (1982) critique of the term as a starting point. We describe some of the different ways the term ‘functional literacy’ has been interpreted in the UK, the USA and Canada since its first international appearance and trace the development of the new policy in England. We offer a c...

Different theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution argue for different sources of information determining initial parsing decisions (e.g., structurally defined parsing principles, lexically specific biases, or referential pragmatics). However, a "constraint-based" approach to syntactic ambiguity resolution proposes that both lexically specific biases and referential pragmatics are used in par...